Major League Baseball is the world’s top professional baseball league with 30 teams in the National League and American League. You can watch each team play all 162 regular season mlb games for free on WS1. Watch free MLB postseason games online and free MLB World Series games online as your favorite teams battle it out for a chance to be called MLB champions.

You can pay for an MLB subscription or you can view free MLB games online with free MLB streams and free MLB streaming games. MLB also manages the WBC tournament which is held every 4 years. You can watch the WBC online for free right here as well with free streaming WBC games. Attendance in Major League Baseball is the highest of all the sports leagues in the world with almost 75 million fans attending games each year but if you can’t make it out to a game watch Major League Baseball live for free on WS1.

Where can I watch MLB online? How can I watch MLB for free? Right here! Don’t miss another free baseball game when you can watch free baseball games online right from your computer.

The use of statistics in baseball is like in no other sport. Long before the term ‘sabermetrics’ was even coined, managers have been using pinch hitters to face opposing hitters, bringing in lefty pitchers to face other lefty hitters, or giving certain hitters a day off against tough pitchers. Today, over a 100 years worth of baseball statistics and game results have been compiled together on sites like Fangraphs and Baseball-Reference so fans can debate who really was the greatest hitter of all time and see how the best players today fare when compared to hitters from generations past.

Catch all the baseball streams online this summer as you watch free baseball here at WS1. Baseball is recognized as America’s national sport, often called its “National Pastime”, and it is popular across Canada and especially in Central and South America, the Caribbean, and parts of East Asia. Don’t miss baseball games when you can watch free streaming baseball games from MLB.com, ESPN, and Fox Sports all on Watch Sports 1.

While the first record of baseball can be traced as far back as the 1700’s – the game was mentioned in 1791 in a piece of a town ordinance which banned its playing near the town meeting house in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, U.S.A. – the origins of the game are quite murky. One story holds that the game was invented by General Abner Doubleday in 1839 in Cooperstown, New York; however, this has been debunked by most baseball historians as nothing more than a myth. Another theory speculates that the game was derived from another game, called Rounders, which was often played in England. Whatever its true origins may be, the game has always been thought of as a uniquely American sport and one that has been identified as its National Pastime.

The First Modern Game

While baseball and other variants of the game (such as town ball) were played throughout the first half of the 18th century, it wasn’t until 1845 that the modern rules were first laid out and the first true game was played at Elysian Fields, in Hoboken, New Jersey. Many of the rules established from that game are still in place today. These include: 9 player teams, 9 innings, bases which are 90 ft apart from each other, and the elimination of throwing the ball at the runner to force an out (rather than tagging the runner). In this first game, which was played between the New York Nine and the New York Knickerbockers; the Nine beat the opposing team by a score of 23-1.

The popularity of the game rose during the Civil War as soldiers from all over the nation began playing the game under one set of rules and brought back the game to their hometowns following the war. In the late 1860s, the governing body of baseball in America began to allow professional teams to play, including the Cincinnati Red Stockings and the Boston Red Stockings.

Professional Baseball

Over the next few decades several attempts would be made to form a professional major league for baseball. The first of these was the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players. Other leagues would come along including the National Base Ball League, the American Base Ball Association, the Union Association, American Association, the Player’s League, and the American League.

Major League Baseball

Baseball’s World Series actually grew out of the intense rivalry between the competing National League and the American Association, which at the end of each season would send each of their champions to play each other in a series of popular postseason games. Major League Baseball, as we know it today, began from that annual tradition and today it consists of teams from both the American and National Leagues.

The Dead-Ball Era

Baseball’s dead-ball era began in 1900 and lasted till 1919. Games played during this era were defined by their low scores and the dominance of Hall of Fame pitchers such as Christy Mathewson, Cy Young, Walter “The Big Train” Johnson, and Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown. Factors contributing to the lack of runs include baseballs which were used throughout the entire game (they would eventually become stained and very difficult to hit as the game progressed), pitchers were allowed to throw spitballs and use foreign substances to manipulate the spin of the baseball, and large cavernous ballparks which make home runs very difficult – thus leading to small ball strategies.

The dead-ball era ended by the early 1920s after the inclusion of several changes, including the banning of the spitball, using more baseballs over the course of the game (which allowed hitters to better see the ball and less opportunity for pitchers to throw an erratic pitch), and the emergence of home run hitters like Babe Ruth which brought a new excitement and a new approach to hitting.

The World War II Era and Breaking the Color Barrier

Although Major League Baseball continued to operate during the Second World War with the blessing of President Roosevelt, many of the game’s biggest stars such as Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio enlisted in the U.S. Armed Forces and served in varying capacities. Williams flew fighter planes while DiMaggio served as a physical education instructor and played exhibition baseball games for troops.

Following the war, Brooklyn Dodgers GM Branch Rickey set in motion plans to break the unspoken gentleman’s agreement which had prevented blacks from participating in Major League Baseball since the 1800s. In 1947, Rickey’s Dodgers called up Jackie Robinson to play in the National League and later that year Larry Doby would break the color barrier in the American League when he appeared in a game for the Cleveland Indians. African American baseball fans soon abandoned their Negro League teams to see these players play, hastening the demise of the league and leading to the full integration of the MLB.

MLB Expansion

For much of Major League Baseball’s history, many of its teams were located in the northeast corner of the U.S. or around the midwest in cities no farther than St. Louis. Beginning in 1953, teams started to expand westward when the Boston’s Braves moved to Milwaukee. Other teams followed and soon cities like Baltimore and Kansas City had their own MLB teams.

Two of the biggest moves came when the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants moved all the way across the country and set up home in Los Angeles and San Francisco, respectively. The moves angered the team’s fanbases but from a business standpoint they were very successful as both teams drew massive audiences in their new cities. In 1969, Canada welcomed its first MLB team when Montreal became home to the Expos. With further moves and expansion over the next four decases, MLB currently consists of 30 teams (all of which play in the U.S. with the exception of the lone Canadian team: the Toronto Blue jays).

The MLB Players Association

After the failure of the players strike in 1890, the dominance of the owners on the game was never in doubt until 1966, when Marvin Miller, a union activist, was hired by the players to form the Major League Baseball Players Association. In that year, star pitchers and Dodger teammates, Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale refused to sign their contracts and accept the reserve clause which allowed teams to hold onto a player as long as their owners wished. In 1970, Cardinals player Curt Flood challenged his trade to the Phillies and although he lost the case before the U.S. Supreme Court, he was able to win concessions against the owners which would allow other players to play without contracts by declaring themselves free agents. In the end, baseball owners were forced to accept the collective bargaining agreement with the Players Associations which led to today’s system of free agency.

During the 1970s, the game was ruled by the championship dynasties of the Oakland A’s, which had superstars like slugger Reggie Jackson, Vida, Blue, and Catfish Hunter; and the Cincinnati Reds, which boasted Hall of Famers in the lineup like Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, Tony Perez, and the all-time hit king, Pete Rose.

The 70s also saw some great baseball records being established. The greatest of them took place early on in the 1974 season when Atlanta Braves outfielder Hammerin’ Hank Aaron broke Babe Ruth’s record for most home runs. The decade also saw the emergence of one of the greatest strikeout pitchers in the game, Nolan Ryan. The Texas pitcher would go on to throw four no-hitters in the mid 1970s and would end his career with an impressive 7 no-hitters to his resume to go along with 5,715 strikeouts.

The 1980s saw the beginning of a large spike in player salaries as free agency and lucrative TV broadcasting and marketing deals brought in huge amount of cash to the league. The game, more than ever, became a business with higher ticket prices for fans attending games and greater labor strife now that hundreds of millions of dollars in profits were at stake.

The Steroid Era

Although human growth hormone and steroid use has become a hot topic in baseball over the past decade, the use of a substance to gain a chemical advantage over other players has been going on for over a century. The first recorded use came as early as 1889 when Hall of Fame pitcher Pud Galvin advocated the use of Brown-Sequard Elixir, a liquid supplement made from the testicles of live dogs and guinea pigs which contained testosterone. A story even goes that Babe Ruth injected himself with a chemical extracted from sheep testicles, but rather than playing any better he ended up terribly ill and was left off the lineup – the cause of his absence was officially attributed to a bellyache.

In World War II, many soldiers were exposed to amphetamines over the course of their service and after the war some continued to use them when they attended college. Amphetamine use in college eventually migrated to other collegiate athletes and then to professional athletes and eventually the MLB. Players from as early as the 1960s and 1970 have admitted to using crude animal steroids and that the use of performance enhancing drugs was widespread even during that time.

Steroid use became a much more talked about topic following the home run surge beginning in the late 1990s when players began hitting 40 or more home runs at a rate that had never been seen before and home runs records, which had stood for decades, were being broken year after year. In addition to home runs, this era saw a huge spike in offense to the point some wondered if hitters had forever gained an advantage over pitchers.

In 2003, MLB started to enforce its banned substance list for the first time by testing its players – even though the substances they were being tested for had been banned since the early 1990s. Even as baseball tried to crack down on drug abuse, its efforts weren’t enough to appease the Federal Government and a panel took action to summon many of the games biggest starts to testify before Congress about the use of steroids in the game. In recent years, MLB and the Major League Baseball Players Association have created much more rigorous testing and created a zero tolerance policy to stem the use of performance enhancing drugs

Where to Watch Major League Baseball Broadcasts

All MLB baseball games are available online to viewers on MLB.TV, however all games within the viewer’s geographic region which are in the exclusive domain of one or more teams are subject to blackout.

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